The Sandbox effect (or sandboxing) is a name given to an observation of the way
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
ranks web pages in its index. It is the subject of much debate—its existence has been written about since 2004, but not confirmed, with several statements to the contrary.
According to the theory of the sandbox effect, links which may normally be weighted by Google's ranking algorithm, not least improving the position of a webpage in Google's index, may be subjected to filtering to prevent their having a full impact. Some observations have suggested that two important factors for causing this filter to come into play are the active age of a domain, and the competitiveness of the keywords used in links.
Active age of a domain should not be confused with the date of registration on a domain's
WHOIS
WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase "who is") is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomou ...
record, but instead refers to the time when Google first indexed pages on the domain. Keyword competitiveness refers to the search frequency of a word on Google search, with observation suggesting that the higher the search frequency of a word, the increasing likelihood that the sandbox filter effect will come into play.
While the presence of the Google Sandbox has been long debated, Google has made no direct disclosure on the matter. However, as the sandbox effect almost certainly refers to a set of filters in play for anti-spam purposes, it is unlikely Google would ever provide details on the matter. In one instance, though, Google's John Mueller, has mentioned that "it can take a bit of time for search engines to catch up with your content, and to learn to treat it appropriately. It's one thing to have a fantastic website, but search engines generally need a bit more to be able to confirm that, and to rank your site — your content — appropriately".
This could be understood as the cause for the sandbox effect.
Google has long been aware that its historical use of links as a "vote" for ranking web documents can be subject to manipulation, and stated such in its original IPO documentation. Over the years, Google has filed a number of patents that seek to qualify or minimise the impact of such manipulation, which Google terms as "link spam".
Link spam is primarily driven by
search engine optimizers who attempt to manipulate Google's page ranking by creating many inbound links to a new website from other websites that they own. Some SEO experts also claim that the sandbox only applies to highly competitive or broad keyword phrases, and can be counteracted by targeting narrow, or so-called long-tail phrases.
History of penalties
Google has been updating its algorithm for as long as it has been fighting the manipulation of organic search results. However, up until May 10, 2012, when Google launched the
Google Penguin
Google Penguin was a codename for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared Grey Ha ...
update, many people wrongly believed that low-quality
backlink
A backlink is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent). A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a website, web page, or web directory.
A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation. The quantity, q ...
s would not negatively affect ranks. While this viewpoint was common, it was not correct, as Google had been applying such link-based penalties for many years, but not made public how the company approached and dealt with what they called "link spam". Since this time there has been a much wider acknowledgement about the dangers of bad SEO and a forensic analysis of backlinks to ensure there are no harmful links.
Link-based penalties
Penalties are generally caused by manipulative backlinks that are intended to favor particular companies in the search results; by adding such links, companies break Google's terms and conditions. When Google discovers such links, it imposes penalties to discourage other companies from following this practice and to remove any gains that may have been enjoyed from such links. Google also penalizes those who took part in the manipulation and helped other companies by linking to them. These types of companies are often low-quality directories which simply listed a link to a company website with manipulative anchor text for a fee. Google argues that such pages offer no value to the Internet and are often deindexed as a result. Such links are often referred to as paid links.
Common forms of links spam
Paid links
Paid links are links that people place on their site for a fee, believing that this will have a positive impact on the search results. The practice of paid links was very popular prior to the Penguin update, when companies believed they could add any types of links with impunity, since Google claimed prior that they ignored these links instead of penalizing websites. To comply with Google's recent TOS, it is imperative to apply the
nofollow
nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines ...
attribute to paid advertisement links. Businesses that buy backlinks from low quality sites attract Google penalty.
Comment spam
These are links left in the comments of articles that are impossible to have removed, as this practice became, so widespread, Google launched a feature to help curb such practices. The nofollow tag simply tells search engines not to trust such links.
Blog networks
Blog networks are a collection of sometimes thousands of blogs that aim to appear unconnected, which then link out to those prepared to pay for such links. Google have typically targeted blog networks and once detecting them have penalized thousands of sites who gained benefits.
Dealing with a penalty
Google has encouraged companies to reform their bad practices and as a result demand that efforts are taken to remove manipulative links. Google launched the Disavow tool on 16 October 2012 so that people could report googling the bad links they had. The Disavow tool was launched mainly in response to many reports of negative SEO, where companies were being targeted with manipulative links by competitors knowing full well that they would be penalized as a result. There has been some controversy over whether the Disavow tool has any effect when manipulation has taken place over many years. At the same time, some anecdotal case studies have been presented, which suggest that the tool is effective, and that former ranking positions can be restored.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO started to occur following the Penguin update when it became common knowledge that Google would apply penalties for manipulative links; such practices as negative SEO have caused companies to be diligent in monitoring their backlinks to ensure they are not being targeted by hostile competitors through negative SEO services.
In the US and UK, these type of activities by competitors attempting to sabotage a website's rankings are considered to be illegal by experts.
Notable penalties
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BeatThatQuote.com – On March 7, 2011, Google purchased BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7 million and, within the same date, penalized BeatThatQuote.com.
*
BMW – On February 6, 2006, Google penalized BMW.de for using
doorway pages Doorway pages (bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages or entry pages) are web pages that are created for the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes (spamdexing). A doorway page will affect the index of a search engine by ins ...
and dropped the site's
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...
to 0.
*
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
– In January 2012, Google's Webspam team penalized the Chrome Browser's homepage for manipulating PageRank with purchased blog posts. The penalty dropped Chrome's homepage's PageRank from 9 to 7 and knocked Chrome off the first page for important keywords such as "browser."
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Expedia
Expedia Inc. is an online travel agency owned by Expedia Group, an American online travel shopping company based in Seattle. The website and mobile app can be used to book airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruise ships, and vacat ...
– In January 2014, Expedia dropped 25% in search visibility, which resulted in Expedia shares dropping 4.5%.
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Overstock.com
Overstock.com, Inc. is an American internet retailer selling primarily furniture headquartered in Midvale, Utah, near Salt Lake City. Businessman Patrick M. Byrne founded Overstock.com in 1999. The company initially sold exclusively surplus and ...
– During fiscal year 2011, Overstock.com attributed a decrease from $1.08 billion to $1.05 billion in revenue to Google penalties.
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Rap Genius
Genius is an American digital media company founded on August 27, 2009, by Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory, and Mahbod Moghadam. The site allows users to provide annotations and interpretation to song lyrics, news stories, sources, poetry, and document ...
– On December 25, 2013, Google penalized Rap Genius for 10 days. The result was a drop of about 700,000 unique visitors per day.
Reverse sandbox effect
A "reverse sandbox" effect is also claimed to exist, whereby new pages with good content, but ''without'' inbound links, are temporarily ''increased'' in rank — much like the "New Releases" in a book store are displayed more prominently — to encourage organic building of the World Wide Web.
David George disputes the claim that Google applies sandboxing to ''all'' new websites, saying that the claim "doesn't seem to be borne out by experience". He states that he created a new web site in October 2004 and had it ranked in the top 20 Google results for a target keyword within one month. He asserts that "no one knows for sure if the Google sandbox exists", and comments that it "seems to fit the observations and experiments of many search engine optimizers". He theorizes that the sandbox "has introduced some
hysteresis
Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past. Plots of a single component of ...
into the system in order to restore a bit of sanity to Google's results".
In an interview with the Search Engine Roundtable website,
Matt Cutts
Matthew Cutts (born 1972 or 1973) is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 20 ...
is reported to have said that there are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that do not apply to all industries.
Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie, authors of ''Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP'', state that they believe that, while Google does not actually ''have'' an explicit "sandbox", the effect itself (however caused) is real.
References
{{Reflist, 30em
Internet terminology
Google Search
Search engine optimization